2013 Twins Spring Training Battle Dashboard: Version 1

With the Twins' Spring Training about half a month old and eight official games in the books, it is about time that I start posting these dashboards again keeping track of how the players who are batting for positions are doing.   It might seem that Spring Training has been going on for a while, and it has because of the World Baseball Classic.  For comparison, last year the first Twins' game of Spring Training was March 3rd.   

I have previously outlined the potential battles for position players as:

• 3 outfield positions, including a back up
• 2 infield positions, including a back up 
• 1 additional bench bat that would be a third Catcher (Mr Butera for example) or a bat off the bench/DH (like Chris Colabello) or an additional infielder or outfielder.

Also indicated that I consider the following players as locks (so I am not tracking them) :

Jamey Carroll
Ryan Doumit
Joe Mauer
Justin Morneau
Trevor Plouffe and
Josh Willingham

and in the same piece, I indicated that the battles for pitchers were for one to three starting positions (depending on Scott Diamond's and Mike Pelfrey's health) and at least four bullpen spots; I consider as locks here (thus not tracked), in addition to the 2 aforementioned if healthy:

Kevin Correia
Vance Worley

Jared Burton
Brian Duensing
Glen Perkins

The ideas behind the mechanics of the dashboards to quantify Spring Training performance of the combatants in both the position player and pitching battles is explained in these two links.

For the pitchers, I quantify using  a measurement created by Bill James more than a decade ago called "Game Score".  It is calculated as follows:

You start with 50 points for each pitcher.
Add 1 point for each out.
Add 1 point for each strikeout.
Subtract 2 points for each hit.
Subtract 4 points for each earned run.
Subtract 2 points for each unearned run.
Subtract 1 point for each walk.
There is a point bonus for pitching more than 4 innings as well, adding 2 points for each IP after the 4th, but this is not too applicable here.

Game Scored of 49-51 are "average" (yellow),
everything higher than 51 "above average" (green),
and everything below 49 "below average" (red).

The pitchers are broken down as "starters" and "relievers" but it is understandable that starters are candidates to make the teams as relievers.

For position players, I devised a similar metric that goes like this:

Start with 0 points (unlike the pitching Game Score that starts with 50)
Add 1 point for each Run, RBI, 2B, SB, BB, and HBP recorded.
Add 2.5 for each hit, 3 for each 3B and 4 for each HR.
Subtract 1 for each CS and GIDP,
subtract 1 for each error,
for catchers add 1 for each CS
Subtract 0.2 for each SO and 0.5 for each AB.

Again, as in the Pitching Battle Dashboard, the Position Player Battle Dashboard is color-coded based on average, above average and below average performances, where:

Average is Batting Game Score between 0 and 2
Above average is Batting Game Score higher than 2
Below average is Batting Game Score less than 0

Without further ado (and no comments)  here is the Dashboard for the Twins' position players:

and here for the pitchers:

There is still many games to be played and these will be changing in pretty much daily basis.   I will publish the next installment in few days.